Leesburg man recounts epic World War II battle on Okinawa

Bill Cumbaa, poses for a portrait at his home in Leesburg on Tuesday,… (Tom Benitez, Orlando Sentinel )

May 27, 2012|By Earl Watson, Correspondent

LEESBURG — Sugar Loaf Hill, Shuri Heights and Horseshoe Ridge — far-off places but not too distant in the memory of Bill Cumbaa, 91, who left some of his buddies at those places in 1945.

A platoon leader with the 1st Marine Division on Okinawa in the final battle of World War II, Cumbaa said his thoughts on this as on most Memorial Days will be of the encounter that decimated his unit in a bitter firefight.

"We were caught in [the enemy's] machine-gun crossfire. I lost half my platoon in that encounter," he recalled. "The fighting was so fierce that I lost men [replacements] before I even got to know them."

The hand-to-hand fighting was in sharp contrast to the first month of the 82-day battle on Okinawa, our nation's costliest — in both casualties and ships — in the Pacific campaign.

As Cumbaa recounted: "What a surprise. We landed unopposed on Easter Sunday, April 1st, 1945. Our 1st and 6th Marine Divisions landed on the west side of the island and quickly took Kadena airfield. From there, Marines headed to the island's northern sector, which it turned out was lightly defended by the Japanese. I didn't lose one man in that phase of the campaign, not for the first month or so."

Meanwhile, Army units battled the Japanese in the island's southern sector, where the enemy was firmly entrenched. After clearing out the enemy in the northern region, Cumbaa and his platoon were sent into the thick of the fight in the southern half of the 67-mile long island.

The Japanese strategy in defending Okinawa, as historian William Manchester noted in his memoir of the Pacific war, "Goodbye Darkness," was to let the Allies come ashore and then sink their ships with kamikaze — suicide — planes, thus isolating the troops. The 100,000 Japanese of the 32nd Army, "all Manchurian veterans, were concentrated in the southern third of the island," Manchester noted.

Cumbaa recalled of those perilous days: "I had a prayer I'd repeat several times a day, asking God to give me the wisdom and courage to perform my assigned duty and lose as few men as possible."

He was injured 12 days before hostilities ended when a soldier next to him stepped on a land mine. The shrapnel tore into his upper leg and thigh, hospitalizing him for the balance of the campaign.